• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1968 0

thirst. But the Gypsy was as stubborn as a mule, and one night he said to them: “I’m giving you your freedom. Clear out if you want to. But if you don’t go, I don’t want anybody ever to tell me again where the circus should head next.” Nobody took off, no doubt because all of them feared other people more than they feared catastrophe. In Caatinga do Moura, Dádiva, the Gypsy’s wife, took sick with fevers that made her delirious, and they had to bury her in Taquarandi. They were forced to begin eating the circus animals. When the rains came again, a year and a half later, Julião and his wife Sabina, Solimão the Black, Pedrim the Giant, the Spider Man, and the Little Star had died. They had lost the wagon with the posters of trapeze artists on the sides and were now hauling their belongings about in two carts that they pulled themselves, until people, water, life returned to the backlands and the Gypsy was able to buy two draft mules.

They began to put on shows again and once more they earned enough to put food in their mouths. But things weren’t the same as before. The Gypsy, crazed with grief at the loss of his children, took no interest in the performances now. He had left the three children in the care of a family in Caldeirão Grande, and when he came back to get them after the drought, nobody in the town could tell him anything about the Campinas family or his children. He never gave up hope of finding them, and years later he was still questioning people in the towns as to whether they’d seen them or heard anything about them. The disappearance of his children—everyone else was sure they were dead—turned him from a man who had once been energy and high spirits personified into a creature filled with bitterness, who drank too much and flew into a fury over anything and everything. One afternoon they were putting on a show in the village of Santa Rosa and the Gypsy was doing the turn that Pedrim the Giant used to do in the old days: challenging any spectator to make his shoulders touch the ground. A robust man presented himself and knocked him clean over at the first shove. The Gypsy picked himself up, saying that he’d slipped and that the man would have to try again. The brawny man again sent him sprawling. Getting to his feet once more, the Gypsy, his eyes flashing, asked him if he’d be willing to repeat his feat with a knife in his hand. The man didn’t really want to fight it out with him, but the Gypsy, having taken leave of his reason, egged him on in such an insulting way that finally there was nothing else the husky fellow could do but accept the challenge. As effortlessly as he’d knocked him down before, he left the Gypsy lying on the ground, with his throat slit and his eyes turning glassy. They learned later that the Gypsy had had the temerity to challenge Pedrão, the famous bandit.

Despite everything, surviving through simple inertia, as if to prove that nothing dies unless it’s meant to (the phrase had come from the Bearded Lady), the circus did not disappear. It was admittedly a mere shadow of the old circus now, huddling round a wagon with a patched canvas top, drawn by a lone burro; folded up inside it was a much-mended tent, which the last remaining performers—the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, the Idiot, and the cobra—set up and slept under each night. They still gave shows and the Dwarf’s stories of love and adventure were still as great a success as in the old days. In order not to tire the burro, they traveled on foot and the only one of them to enjoy the use of the wagon was the cobra, which lived in a wicker basket. In their wanderings hither and yon, the last members of the Gypsy’s Circus had met up with saints, bandits, pilgrims, migrants, people with the most startling faces dressed in the most improbable attire. But never, before that morning, had they come across a flaming-red mane of hair such as that of the man stretched out full-length on the ground that they caught sight of as they rounded a bend of the trail that leads to Riacho da Onça. He was lying there motionless, dressed in a black garment